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Topic: How about another sim? (Read 231 times)

I still play RB3D, but all of my newest development has been with the open source, OpenGl/ OpenSceneGraph based flight sim FlightGear.

Let me post some images..

BTW That's the Somme valley above near Albert, it really looks like the Somme, a bunch of Oxbow swamps and lakes connected by a small river.

These are a few of about 30 planes I've made for FightGear. Presently I have 5 Aerodromes in FG's scenery, including Belfort, Habshiem, Corcieux, Ghent-Merelbeke, and Stow Maries in the UK. All of the airfields are correctly placed and the Corine based terrain mesh is as fine a match to reality as you could ask for in a freeware sim. One caveat is, FlightGear is a multi OS project and the primary installation is not for the faint-hearted, but it's Windows version runs great on middling 2010ish level gaming computers with 1 gig video cards, 2 core AMD 3 gig CPU's, and 32 or 64 bit Windows. It also has seasonal terrain and tree shaders, cloud and precipitation shaders and real weather fetching from local metar sources, and it's really quite awesome to play in MMP, the servers are wideband and there's not much latency.

I don't expect much response, but after reading this forum for the past 2 years, it has me wondering, instead of wishing you folks had a modern OpenGl version of RB3D, why not try out an existing simulator that is open source and very adaptable, user modifiable, runs equally well on both 32 and 64 bit Win OS... ( I run WinXP, yup that's my screenshots, all on a dated old XP gaming rig.) and see if you like the look and feel of FlightGear.

I have, ( with the help of a couple FG coders made a lot of progress with the WWI combat end of the sim, there are forward MG's that have working submodels, observer positions with mouse-lookable gun tracking, you can fly defensive turns while also tracking your MMP opponent with your rear gun merely by centering on his position visually with the mouse-look.

The scenery is downloaded on the fly while you are online you can also fly offline, the one thing you cannot do is have complex date driven missions and campaigns like RB3D has, yet... With the open source structure I would think someone could find a way to port that into FG, there is AI flight support and a recent combat programming AI support called Bombable. I have coded driveable vehicles, a Thornycroft AA truck that has an AA cannon that also has the mouse tracking aim, you can defend your airfield.

It's heady stuff and I think that anyone who loves the immersion of RB3D should give this sim a serious look.

From the time and other resources put into RB3D SP, and feedback from programmers who actually worked on the sim starting 20 years ago, it seems technically viable for a programmer to bring the Mission part into an opensource platform.

No owner beyond Dynamix EVER treated Red Baron 3D with the respect for its quality it deserved/deserves. Weird as hell to people who love the game.